Costa Rica: sensational and sustainable

My 5am alarm call was the sonorous roar of howler monkeys staking out their territory. As I woke with a start at Lapa Rios Ecolodge, I saw squabbling squirrel monkeys swing past my terrace, foraging for insects. Giant iguanas sunned themselves on tree trunks and unwieldy looking toucans perched on branches like strange fruit.

A pair of vociferous scarlet macaws preened each other, while a Golfo Dulce poison dart frog – barely larger than a thumbnail – hopped out of my path. Spider monkeys put on a show of aerial gymnastics around the swimming pool. And that was all before I’d had breakfast. Welcome to Costa Rica, a wildlife wonderland.

Millions of years ago, the country became part of a land bridge connecting the North and South American continents, allowing their flora and fauna to mix – no wonder the Spanish conquistadors christened it the Rich Coast.

Today the country is home to an estimated 6% of the world’s plant and animal species. The sheer diversity of its exotic flora and fauna is staggering: around 850 species of birds, 600 species of butterflies and almost 240 types of mammals, including humpback whales, dolphins, sea turtles and four species of monkey – all in an area around two-thirds the size of Scotland. But it hasn’t all been plain sailing.

In 1940, 75% of the country was forested but by 1987, this had dropped to 21%. Fortunately the forward-thinking government realised it needed to protect the country’s greatest asset and it’s back up to 52%.

Hailing from California, Teri and Glenn Jampol rescued a piece of land in the fertile Central Valley from a Motocross dealership. It was 1985 and they had no sustainable models to follow; it was, in their words, “trial and a lot of error”.

But their hard work paid off with the creation of Finca Rosa Blanca, a carbon-neutral organic coffee farm, private nature reserve and art-filled boutique hotel, surrounded by a modern-day tropical Eden. Here, everything is super-sized, from the butterflies – giant blue morphos – to the foliage – enormous swiss-cheese plants, elephant ears as big as umbrellas, luxuriant ferns, lofty palms festooned with creepers and tree branches laden with bromeliads.

In the late 1980s, tourism was growing at a rapid rate and eco-resorts were sprouting up faster than you could say ‘alfalfa’. With even car hire firms jumping on the eco bandwagon, it was difficult to tell if you were being greenwashed. Thankfully there is a way to be sure. The Government-run CST (Certification for Sustainable Tourism) is a programme that hotels voluntarily join and are awarded one to five leaves, based on several core principles, including how they minimise their impact on the environment, sponsorship of projects involving the local community and their contribution to increasing environmental knowledge within that community.

Along with its environmental projects, Finca Rosa Blanca aims to introduce guests to the country’s often overlooked culture and cuisine, with visits to cheese-makers, vanilla and cacao farms, and a traditional trapiche (sugar mill). The food it serves is as organic as possible, and if it’s not plucked from their own greenhouse it’s locally sourced.

Its chickens provide the eggs for breakfast, which are served with gallo pinto (rice and beans), piquant pico de gallo salsa and freshly made corn tortillas, all washed down with its own delicious organic coffee.

I visited the local market with the chef, where stalls were piled high with tropical fruits – guava, jocote, soursop – and giant tubers, before heading back to the kitchen and learning to conjure up a Caribbean-style ceviche with coconut milk and Panamanian peppers, and tasty tamarind and coffee chicken.

A few hours north of the Central Valley, sitting high on the country’s mountainous spine and reached by a bone-jangling unpaved road, lies Monteverde. It was established by a small group of American Quakers in the 1950s, pacifists who came to Costa Rica to evade Korean War conscription.

The Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve sits at the meeting point of the Continental Divide, where moist air from the Caribbean meets dry air from the Pacific, creating a hotbed of biodiversity.